Saturday, February 12, 2011

We are still happy with the progress we have seen so far, considering we didn't get started until mid November, and we missed 2.5 weeks over Christmas, ultimately we've really only been building for 10 weeks so far, which has our hopes high for getting the keys earlier than we had scheduled. (Which would be GREAT, mums house is getting a little cramped :-)

So here below are the latest pics with the brickwork finished, we believe the electrical will be done next week and I suppose from then on it's just the internals and fittings etc. It seems as though the rest of the work to be done should happen rather quickly., although we're trying to stay grounded so as to not set expectations too high.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

ok, so I might have been a little tardy with the updates on this blog, However......there's been good reason.

Over the last couple of weeks there has not been much visible progress, and I know a lot of people who are reading this blog are mainly just keen to see what the place looks like now, that's the reason why I haven't made any updates, because I don't have any new pics to look at.

So over the last couple of weeks we have seen the roof completed in full, all tiles, capping and sarking are all done.

Next was the gas and water lines, we met the plumber onsite, really nice bloke, and he advised he would be spending 3 or so days there just putting all the plumbing in. That went ahead and has been completed (I assume) because on close inspection we can see all the pipe work running through the walls and through the floor joysts for the upstairs plumbing work. It looks like it was a bigger job than we expected. It all looks very good.

Which brings us to this week....

We had expected the brickies to complete the rest of the brickwork and when we went onsite Monday they were indeed there with a new delivery of bricks, setting everything up on the scaffolding. We returned on Tuesday to find that no one was onsite, and couldn't see any more work done. We assumed that the heat had caused the workers to stop work (Sydney has had a week of temperatures between 35 - 42 degree days) which we were a little dissapointed about because it just meant more time missed. we returned on Wednesday, again a very hot day, and again, no one onsite.

The temperatures cooled by today (Thursday) but it was still 34 degrees, and we were nearby so decided to head out just in case they had been back, and low and behold the brickies were back at it. We got out and said hello and had a chat to them, and it turns out our assumptions about the heat were wrong.

The work had resumed on Tuesday, however after laying a couple hundred bricks at the back of the house, the brickies realised that the bricks were the wrong colour (similar, but definitely the wrong ones) and as it turns out the delivery from the supplier had sent the wrong brick. So the brickies at that point stopped laying the bricks and contacted the Site Manager. Apparently they had to wait for confirmation that the bricks needed to be removed, and confirm delivery of the correct bricks. Wednesday afternoon they were advised to go ahead and rip the incorrect bricks out and re-do them with a new delivery of the correct bricks.

So this morning we had a pile of old wrong bricks in the front yard and they were proceding with the correct bricks. Some of you may be annoyed by this mistake, maybe think that we're upset about it, but ultimately, we're happy. Of course during the process of building a house there's the possibility that mistakes could be made, what we are happy about is that the brickies were good enough to notice and to cease work until the problem was fixed. We'd much rather have a day or two lost in the progress than have a house that was two toned in colour and weird looking, which may have been the case if they had completed the job I suppose? I'm not sure how keen the supervisor would have been to rip them all out if they had've completed the whole house that way.

So barring any more setbacks, we are hoping that within the next few days, maybe mid to end of next week, the last of the brickwork will be complete. At that point in time I should have some new pictures to look at, so as to satiate those of you who don't appreciate my profound opus.